On the life of [Dennis Ritchie]

Chances are you have already heard of the passing of [Dennis Ritchie]. We admit, we’re among the throngs who knew little of his life, but [Cade Metz] has posted an excellent remembrance of his life which we think is well worth reading.

[Dennis] passed on October 12th at the age of 70. This image shows him receiving the National Medal of Technology awarded to him by [Bill Clinton] in 1998. His legacy lives on in the work that earned him this award as the creator of the C programming language; a side project which he developed to help him achieve the creation of a new system kernel called UNIX. This work, of course, was the precursor that led to universal software packages like OSX, iOS, Linux, and even Windows (which at one point was itself written using the C language).

There has been some Internet fodder regarding media coverage of [Steve Jobs’] death and not of [Dennis’] passing. It’s harder for those lacking experience with programming to comprehend [Dennis’] contributions. We’re glad to have an opportunity to pass on the story of his life and to take a moment to appreciate his accomplishments.

Oh my god! I did’t know about the genius that mister Dennis Ritchie was, but I thank him for all he has created and I am sorry and I feel downright awful for the lack of gratitude I have given him, and the entire world has given him. May you rest in peace and hopefully be rewarded and praised for your contribution.

I still have my first edition of K & R around here somewhere… It certainly saw plenty of use over the years. A huge step forward from “8K BASIC”. And UNIX too (I run the MINT variant). Thanks Dennis. :-)

It’s really impossible to overstate just how important this man’s work has been to the modern world and the Information Era.

Sadly he hasn’t got the recognition he deserves outside of tech industries, but I suppose that’s life. Turing and Babbage both lack recognition as well, and all three are on the same level in terms of importance of contributions to the field.

i did have my moments with the C compiler, spent hours debugging my faulty code, it became part of my personality now, hail! the master, who is now ubiquitous, we will never forget the contribution that made us coders, hackers, nerds, professionals.
RESPECT.RIP

“Sadly he hasn’t got the recognition he deserves outside of tech industries..”

I couldn’t agree more, but isn’t that typical of people in our profession/hobby? I didn’t know the man (but knew his work), yet somehow I get the feeling he didn’t do it for the recognition he deserved. He saw a need and developed a solution.

My gratitude goes to folks like Mr. Ritchie, as well as those who recognize his contributions.

As a computer scientist in training, I salute the tremendous influence dmr has brought upon computing. Namely the influence C has had on all subsequent programming languages and Unix/POSIX market share, meaning kids today have the luxury of going to university and never knowing the pain of say MVS, OS/360, or JCL.

“was the precursor that led to universal software packages…” 1/2 the products list are from one company, despite having like a million other packages based on C. Practically every OS out there is written in C.

“I couldn’t agree more, but isn’t that typical of people in our profession/hobby?”
This is unfortunately true for any profession – when was the last time you heard of a great mathematician/biologist/physicist passing, no matter what were his contributions. They were mourned in amongst their own, but not by the general public. Only media visible people will get a public mourning.

Dennis Ritchie, as well as Bell Labs, gave us C. I cannot imagine what my college education would be like if it were not for C, its derivatives and all of the software built using Ritchie’s technology.

That said, I feel ashamed that I do not (yet) own a copy of K&R’s book, but in honor of Ritchie, I will get one.

I believe Apple are moving away from using Linux (or more specifically GPL) tools and moving towards things under other licenses.

Most of the changes away have been because Apple has a company-wide rule that they will not ship a single line of code released under the GPLv3 (and that includes contributing code from GPLv2 licensed Apple source trees for things like GCC back to the upstream GPLv3 tree)

Steve Jobs dies and the papers go mad, but he would be nothing without the things that Ritchie created. Then just a week later he dies too, but the papers are still on about what a great man(pfft) jobs was.

Three score & ten.
I’d rank D. Ritchie with Bob Pease.
The Old Guard passes.
[Anyway, they got medals and recognition: as offices, labs, and big bucks on pay-day, assuredly — even if there were no parades.]
Three score & ten.

It was time that someone give credit to Ritchie. I found very annoying that all the media give so much credit to Steve Jobs but nothing to Ritchie. I am not complaining about the achievements of Steve Jobs; however, Richie did give the community something that without it, we would still being far behind of what we are today.

I’ve hacked my own kernel on a bochs emulator, which surely would have driven me insane if I was forced to do it in asm. I’ve used C99 on Nintendo DS homebrew programs, again places where manipulating multiple cores and sound and graphics chips would have been a manic mess in assembly. Now, I do most of my programing in various forms of ECMA; all of which looks very much like C or C++.

As gamers, we might have gotten up to the 16-bit era on consoles with devkits aimed at asm programers, but after that, they saw the light and looked to C.

As hackers, we may argue on which chip maker is the best in the arm v pic v avr holy war. But most of us have used C to program those chips at some point. Even the arduino language syntax is based on C.

Maybe without Mr Ritchie someone else would have given us a language to do all of these things. But they didn’t have to; because C worked. We could make the same discussion about the UNIX kernel, or his involvement with Multics and dynamic linking and ring-based security. All of the ideas still being used and built upon.

Wow, what a shock… How many lines of C code have been written and compiled since it was first released to the world? Must be in the billions! C is probably being used by someone at this very moment, in every country on Earth. Ritchie created the revolution that married hardware and software and jump started the that *NIX and PC world. He has now passed, and most people will never understand don’t have a clue… Someone already said it. If not appreciated by all, he has become immortal.